Reaffirming prior statements, Sun said that it intends to open-source its Java and N1 software at a later date. The free software will cover its Java Enterprise System set of server middleware, Java development tools and N1 management software. The move will create a single package called the Solaris Enterprise System. It will include Sun's Solaris 10 operating system, PostgreSQL open-source database, the Java Enterprise System server software and tools, Sun N1-branded provisioning and management tools, and Secure Desktop software.

As someone that has been accused of trolling on this matter, I feel somewhat trolled myself I like what Sun says they are going to do, but the problem is twofold:

1. Motormouth Schwartz - let's say no more about that idiot.

2. Sun seem to have no sense of urgency. They "sort of" come through eventually, but give MS years of notice every time. Who knows how long it will take to implement these plans, and what MS will have done to subvert them by then?

In my case, and maybe that of many others, this "disrespect" of which you speak is born mainly of frustration and sheer exasperation at how these fine ideas are often rendered irrelevant by the passage of time.

man you really have no clue about what your talking about, everything sun has said has come true. Maybe you should read the blogs and statements from the employees about sun's announcements and strategies.

your one of those people that probably think solaris still isn't open sourced although sun claimed they "will".

So tell us specificly what parts of Solaris 10 are not open source? Or do you actually believe all of Solaris 10 is available from opensolaris.org?

Sun recently lied in a press release about Oracle running on their "open source" OS "Solaris 10(tm)". Solaris 10 is not open source. OpenSolaris is and I have yet to see a stable distribution of it that's worth a damn. Also Sun doesn't seem to be doing much to build a competing open source OS to their Solaris 10 product anytime soon. So why do you call Solaris open source? Nobody uses OpenSolaris.

And Solaris 10 ain't OpenSolaris:
No matter how much you want to believe we went to war with Iraq to bring them freedom and democracy nothing can change the fact that we started this war on the pretense they had weapons of mass destruction. Rewriting history, in any form, is the recourse of a coward. Sun's execs disagreed with the Free Software and Linux community's efforts to spread open source software. They stated publicly many times their attitude about the GPL. To retract those statements now and act as if they've been a big open source player all this time is mighty Orwellian of them. They reap what they sow.

Name ONE Linux company that ships the standard Linux kernel as defined by Linus Torvalds. Every single one of these MF'ing Linux vendors ships a modified kernel.

Also name ONE Linux company that ships a 100% LSB compliant distro - even RMS's pee blessed distro Debian is not in compliance. None of these MF'ing guys ship anything standard - they want to lock you into their little world just like MS or Sun or IBM does so what is the point of open source?

"Every single modified version is still free software. Solaris is not free or open source."

It;s not huh? I guess that is why there are at least four open source projects I know of that are based on combining Solaris with GNU tools? Because Solaris is not open source.

I hate to tell you, but Solaris is released under an genuine OSI APPROVED open source license. So YES, it most certainly is open source. Even by OSI standards. Crawl out from the rock you have been living under before you post stuff that makes you look totally ignorant.

First of all, what's with the ego projection, this association of all things you dislike into one clump you can point at and call evil/bad/morally wrong/ "orwellian" / "cowards", etc. I mean Iraq, WTF?

Secondly, one can support opensouce AND not support the GPL. Somewhere in the history of some X windows code (perhaps it was XFree86 or the move from MIT's X consortium to Open Group's X11R5/6), I recall in an interview the choice being made in choosing the MIT License to specifically avoid the GPL.

You sir are an idiot. Everyone knows Saddam had WMD. HE USED THEM. We found 500 tons of uranium, dumbass.

The fact they weren't falling out of every warehouse matters not a BIT. Go look up the definition of a lie: Knowing one thing is true while stating something different. For the publicly educated: BUSH DIDNT LIE.

Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and yet, they bomb Iraq - does that make *ANY* sense what so ever?

500 tonnes would be alot of Urainium - ALOT of Uranium, hardly something you can hide in the back shed.

Secondly, the so-called 'document' used in the state of the nation speech, was actually later found to be forged - there was no searching for supplies - and yet GWB, knowing full of this, made out that it was fact, when all evidence proved contry.

There were NO weapons of mass distraction, sorry, distruction - 2 years and nothing has been found, a little conventional amo, and thats about it.

Sorry, but GWB simply played on the xenophobic ignorance of the average yank to push forward his and his associates Straussian agenda, coupled with the use of the noble lie - aka, religion, as a uniting force against anyone who apposes them. Its North Korea all over again, minus the great hall of the people.

But hey, if Americans keep on the same course, maybe the empire will self implode under a mass of debt, stupidity, corruption and fundamentalist religious nuts hell bent on pushing their particular brand of social engineering which makes the left and their 'progression policies' look tame in comparison.

Are you truly moronic enough to believe that Iraq never had WMD? The question is what happened to the WMD. Get a clue and go read the Dilfer report.

P.S. Bombing Iraq was not punishment for 9/11, it was what resulted when people realise what could happen should the wrong people get their hands on WMD. But you can think of it as punishment for the payments Saddam made to families of suicide bombers operating in Israel.

Stupid toughts not related to OSnews:
{Dear anonymous, if GWB ever wanted to fight REAL terrorism, he should have targeted Saodi Arbia first, even before afganstan which is just a battlefield. the real stock of mass destruction weapons aka Explosive Humans tech. and Faschist Islm Propaganda Corps lies there, between two Petrol pumps (and thanks to petrol-$). Irk was just a std diktatorship, weak, previsible and stupid. In fact, GWB-admin-lobby-party-sect-corps etc did the worst 2 choices for the "free world" : attaking the bad countries AND defending SA interests (in term of SA $$$ and public image). one good explanation for that is corrup$ion...}

ok let's get back to Sun, i think it's a great move especially that Sun have the choice to not "do" opensource. opensource is not intended to give users freesoftware (freeware exist for that). it is a way to create an ecosystem around either it's patented techs or it's service (which pays better for a well known brand).

GPL is not the only opensource license available, CDDL is also approved by the OSI as an opensource license
Most of solaris 10 is opensource, and a lot more of the source is to come, the problem is that the actual solaris 10 was released before the sources.
Opensolaris is a young poject you should give it some time, after all, it took more than 10 years for linux to become what it is today
And about the opensolaris distributions, well, what linux distros are stable? opensolaris distributions are now in continued developemnt, just like fedora, opensuse or even debian, and if you really need stable, well, there is solaris 10
This 2005 will be a year to remember for sun and solaris users, not only they now have access to one of the best os's (if not the best) available for free and with most of the source but also they can get a lot of tools for it for free.
I think sun finally found the right path, and I look forward to seeing lots of great stuff from them

I bet you're one of those that only rely on press releases. If words speak louder than actions for you, then Sun is great. However, for most people, actions speak louder than words, so they know to steer clear away from anything Sun. I'm saying this because our company has been constantly shafted by Sun with hidden details and their incompetant engineers and partners.

"constantly shafted by Sun with hidden details and their incompetant engineers and partners."

thats funny because last i checked their engineers were an extremely intelligent bunch, take a look at Bryan Cantrill's MIT35 award recently. Maybe a salesperson screwed you, I wouldn't say that would be a problem unique to Sun though

Well I'd like to have a look at OpenSolaris, but before I can do that I have to register at Sun's site - AGAIN, download Solaris 10, install Solaris 10 onto a spare machine, build OpenSolaris myself, install OpenSolaris onto yet ANOTHER spare machine, and maybe, MAYBE, I'll be able to see what all the fuss is about.

I'm glad to see that the "Java everything" naming has finally been eliminated now that the "Java Workstation" (that had nothing to do with Java) was replaced with the "Ultra" and the "Java Enterprise System" (that had little to do with Java) is now "Solaris Enterprise System".

No. It's about Sun's enterprise software, not their VM or class libraries for what regular people understand as Java. That will stay non-open source, and Sun has no plans to open that (VM, class libs) up, as the article says.

The server encountered an internal error (Internal Server Error) that prevented it from fulfilling this request.
exception

java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.sun.starlight.repository.meta.impl.ElementManager.getGlobalElement (Unknown Source)
at com.sun.starlight.repository.meta.impl.ElementManager.getElement(Unkno wn Source)
at com.sun.starlight.repository.meta.impl.RepositoryContext.getElementDef inition(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.starlight.repository.meta.impl.RepositoryImpl.getElementValues ByElementQuery(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.starlight.presentation.RendererUtil.getSiteName(RendererUtil.j ava:367)
at com.sun.starlight.presentation.DispatcherFilter.processRequest(Dispatc herFilter.java:196)
at com.sun.starlight.presentation.DispatcherFilter.doFilter(DispatcherFil ter.java:462)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(Appli cationFilterChain.java:213)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFi lterChain.java:193)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperVa lve.java:243)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:566)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java :472)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:943)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextVa lve.java:190)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:566)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.CertificatesValve.invoke(CertificatesValve. java:246)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:564)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java :472)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:943)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.invoke(StandardContext.java:2 347)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.ja va:180)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:566)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorDispatcherValve.invoke(ErrorDispatcher Valve.java:170)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:564)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.ja va:170)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:564)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve.invoke(AccessLogValve.java:4 68)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:564)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java :472)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:943)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValv e.java:174)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invokeNext(StandardPipeline. java:566)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(StandardPipeline.java :472)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(ContainerBase.java:943)
at org.apache.ajp.tomcat4.Ajp13Processor.process(Ajp13Processor.java:458)
at org.apache.ajp.tomcat4.Ajp13Processor.run(Ajp13Processor.java:551)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:534)

Actually, Java can be restributed as long as your reason for redistributing it is because an application you are delivering requires is. But no, you can't redistribute it verbatim unless you have an agreement with Sun. I don't see how that is really an issue though.

And besides, it's only Sun's implementation of Java that can't be redistribute verbatim. The specs are open, and anyone is free to create a JVM under any license they want to. Harmony will be freely redistributable

The justification for going to war with Iraq was that Saddam had anthrax and other toxic weapons factories, mobile factories, scud and other missiles that could reach England and possibly even the US, spys with briefcase nukes they bought from Russia, and they were purifying uranium as well as obtaining more from Niger. Any of this ring a bell?

So here we are and all the millions we spent searching for WMDs have turned up less than 10% of what they told us we would find.

This mistake cost us billions of dollars and thousands of our lives and 5 years of psychelogical stress for each and every American who heard these threatening reports.

As for religion 'policies', WTF was Terry Shivo all about? And the amendment to the constitution to ban gay marriage? What The f--k!

Christians deserve absolutely no respect. After 5 years of tolerating their dogma and actions I have reached my limit. The gloves are off. Care to take it outside?

Will someone please delete the comments in this thread that have to do with the Iraq war? And no, I don't mean just mod them down. I mean get rid of them. Cause no doubt they will resurface even if modded down in the form of someone bringing it back up again.

Let's get one thing clear. Java is a language. Java can neither be open or closed source. Sun's JVM is a piece of software that implements the JAVA sepcification (which any one is free to implement ala IBM, Classpath etc.).

Sun's JVM not being open source has nothing to do with Java being open or closed.

Me: *BSD isn't a "Linux distro" nor is its license dimwitted, nor is that the reason Java can't be redistributed with it. Get a clue, please.

I know *BSD isn't a linux distribution. I specifically didn't include BSD in my response because not all BSDs have a problem with Sun's JRE and JDK. So the wildcarded *BSD in the OP's statement is false. My response however is accurate.

Sun has moved to a new license the Sun Community License, like the GPL it is a viral license, but making all it touches subject to Sun licensing fee. The SCSL even goes so far as to define any implementation of a Sun specification as a "Modified Work". Basically, this means that if you implement any part of the new 1.2 API or Jini API, even from scratch, Sun will "own" your implementation and you will have to pay them for the right to use it.

13. "Modification(s)" means (i) any change to Covered Code;
(ii) any new file or other representation of computer
program statements that contains any portion of Covered
Code; and/or (iii) any new Source Code implementing any
portion of the Specifications.